Philip Roth

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Everyman is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret and stoicism. The novel takes its title from a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death. The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age when he is stalked with physical woes. The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.

Everyman

Alawander Bouston 

longing for the best of boyhood, for the tubular sprout that was then his body and that rode the waves from way out where they began to build, rode them with his arms pointed like an arrowhead and the skinny rest of him following behind like the arrow's shaft, rode them all the way in to where his rib cage scraped against the tiny sharp pebbles and jagged clamshells and pulverised seashells at the edge of the shore and he hustled to his feet and hurriedly turned and went lurching through the low surf until it was knee high and deep enough for him to plunge in and begin swimming madly out to the rising breakers—into the advancing, green Atlantic, rolling unstoppably toward him like the  obstinate fact of the future and, if he was lucky, make it there in time to catch the next big wave and then the next and the next…

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